﻿Kill Your Darlings ﻿Special screening with Director John Krokidas

Guerrilla Zoo in association with the University of East London, is proud to present a special screening of Kill Your Darlings and Q&A with film director and co-writer John Krokidas on Saturday 30th August 2014. Ginsberg. Kerouac. Burroughs. And Lucien Carr. The last name may be less familiar, but the real-life character was the linchpin who first brought together these three icons of American literary and cultural revolution in a galvanizing drama of murder and obsession. “People have been fascinated with these guys for the past 50 or 60 years,” says KILL YOUR DARLINGS director and co-writer John Krokidas, “But we wanted to approach this not as a biopic about these three legendary writers, but rather as a story of who they were as adolescents—awkward, still trying to figure out who they really were. In 1944, when Allen Ginsberg was 17 turning 18, when Burroughs was 29 going on 30, they still hadn‘t written a word. For us, what was fascinating was not so much the great men that they would become, but the insecure adolescents and young adults who were trying to figure out that greatness inside.”

In 1944, Allen Ginsberg was a nervous, straitlaced freshman at Columbia University. Jack Kerouac was a washed-up college running back who had lasted all of eight days in the U.S. Navy. William S. Burroughs was a medical school dropout, former door-to-door insect exterminator and budding drug addict, hanging on the fringes of the New York bohemian scene after following Lucien Carr and David Kammerer, friends from his native St. Louis, to Manhattan. But within months of their coming together to declare and pursue their ‘New Vision’ for art and literature, Kammerer was dead, stabbed in the heart by his former protégé and lover, Carr.

Shot from a script by director Krokidas and Austin Bunn, KILL YOUR DARLINGS features a compelling young ensemble that includes Daniel Radcliffe (the Harry Potter series) as the young Allen Ginsberg, Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire) as Jack Kerouac, Ben Foster (The Messenger) as William S. Burroughs, Dane DeHaan (In Treatment) as Lucien Carr and Michael C. Hall (Dexter) as David Kammerer. Rounded out by a supporting cast that includes Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Margot at the Wedding), Kyra Sedgwick (The Closer) and David Cross (Arrested Development), KILL YOUR DARLINGS delivers a picture of the nascent Beat Generation that we‘ve never seen before, and tells the true story of the emotional crucible that shaped its voice and vision.